Friday, June 29, 2012

Gotcha!

So I almost ditched the OpenTV IDE again! Nothing is ever easy. I have been busy building the eclipse plugin to complement the OOOCode libraries I have been making, and everything was going great, until I tried to actually deploy the plugin in the OpenTV IDE...

Nothing, nada, zip. It just doesn't show up and nowhere does it report any errors!

All morning I spent cursing this hacked together, Frankenstein, eclipse monstrosity. This afternoon, though, I have to apologise so we can move on together in harmony.

So what's the story...

Well i'm still a bit peaved that when eclipse plugins don't load, there is no obvious error reported anywhere, but eventually I found a comment in a forum suggesting the use of the OSGI console to load the plugin and diagnose it manually. Easy, I just have to launch the OpenTV IDE with the -console option.

So that was it. In my eagerness to have everything unit tested and to adopt test driven development I had fallen into a trap. My deployable jar file also includes the unit tests and is thus dependent on the JUnit bundle. Now I have to get Eclipse to export a jar file without the unit tests (for now i have worked around the problem by copying the org.junit bundle from the JEE Eclipse distribution to the OpenTV IDE plugins folder as well).